State wants cleaner water pumped into lake

LAKE ELSINORE -- The state may soon grant a five-year extension
to an experimental program that has seen nearly 3 billion gallons
of recycled water pumped into Lake Elsinore over the past couple of
years, water district officials said Wednesday.

While that supplemental water has helped stabilize the lake
level, the state says that it will only grant the extension if
Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District promises to significantly
reduce the amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen contained in that
water, which district officials say would be costly.

The deal now being discussed between the water district and the
Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board could oblige
Elsinore Valley to reduce phosphorus levels by up to 75 percent and
inorganic nitrogen levels by as much as 40 percent. Both chemicals,
called nutrients, are prevalent in urban runoff, and feed the algae
that robs the lake of oxygen and causes the periodic fish die-offs
that plague the lake.

Several water district officials said Wednesday they are not
happy about the coming requirements.

"It seems like their goal is to meet these goals, and it's a
clean lake or nothing," board member Phil Williams said at a
special Wednesday study session on the issue. He added that the
district is working hard to lower the nutrient levels of the
recycled water going in the lake, but keeping the lake level up is
also an important element in improving water quality.

Lake officials have struggled for years to come to grips with
the alternating cycles of drought and heavy rains that have seen
the lake overflow, then dry up. Lake Elsinore loses fully one-third
of its volume to evaporation each year, and adding the recycled
water has helped control the drop.

In 2000, a coalition of government agencies was formed to
address water quality issues in the 750-square-mile San Jacinto
Watershed that feeds into the lake. Keeping the lake full is part
of that effort, since as lake levels drop, the amount of nutrients
stirred up from the lake bottom increases, worsening water
quality.

The coalition, known as the Lake Elsinore San Jacinto Watersheds
Authority, is made up of representatives from the cities of Lake
Elsinore, Canyon Lake, Riverside County, the water district and
state. The authority received $15 million in state bond money to
introduce programs that would help stabilize lake levels and
improve water quality.

In 2001, the water quality board authorized a pilot program that
allowed the watersheds authority and the water district to release
about 3 billion gallons of heavily treated waste water into the
lake.

Since then, the water district has released about 2.8 billion of
those gallons into the lake. When the program was set to expire
earlier this year, the water board gave the water district and the
authority a six-month extension. That extension on the recycled
water program is set to expire in December.

To comply with the federal Clean Water Act, regional water
quality control boards around the state are forcing water agencies
to improve quality standards in their watersheds, by reducing the
amount of nutrients and chemicals released into the watershed. The
Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board is now making its
final determinations as to how much those nutrient levels must be
reduced in Western Riverside County in the coming years.

In December, the water quality board will make its decision on
what those figures will be for Lake Elsinore, water district
officials said Wednesday.

The likely target figures for the lake will mean that the
phosphorus levels of the recycled water it puts into the lake must
be reduced significantly, by 75 percent for phosphorus and 40
percent for inorganic nitrogen, a water quality control board
official said Wednesday.

"We are not saying they can't discharge (recycled) water into
the lake; we're just saying they have to reduce the nutrients,"
said Cindy Li, a water quality control board engineer-geologist who
is helping to determine just what those target nutrient levels will
be.

Elsinore Valley General Manager Ron Young said that he believes
the water district will not have too much trouble hitting the
target on reducing phosphorus levels. The watershed agency will be
funding an estimated $1.3 million upgrade to the water district's
main treatment plant on Chaney Street and those upgrades should
allow the water district to cut the phosphorus levels.

"I think we can reach that goal by June 2006," Young said.

However, the 40 percent reduction in inorganic nitrogen levels
will be slightly more problematic, he added. One possible solution
to reducing those levels, he said, would be for the district to
make major improvements to the wetlands on the flood plain at the
south end of the lake. The district would release the water into
the wetlands that would be specially designed to treat the water,
using bacteria to consume the nitrogen, he said.

"It may take five years -- that's what we are working on," Young
said.

The water board has been monitoring the nutrient levels in the
lake since the experimental recycled water program began, said the
water quality control board's Li.

During that time, the nutrient levels in the lake have risen
significantly, she said. But scientists are not yet sure what the
cause of those increases are, she said, adding that they may also
have been caused by lowering lake levels or the storm runoff water
that spilled over the Canyon Lake Dam and into Lake Elsinore in
2002. Since her agency still doesn't know what caused the increase
in nutrients in Lake Elsinore, she said it wouldn't be fair to cut
off the recycled water program.

But for the recycled water program to continue, the district
will have to get the nutrient levels down, she added.

"Our staff is not either/or -- it's for putting the (recycled)
water in the lake, but controlling the nutrients," Li said.